Truth or consequences

Sandy Hook families sue Alex Jones over his conspiracy theories

After the body of Jesse Lewis, age 6, was recovered from his classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School, his father, Neil Heslin, cradled him for a final time. At the top of Jesse’s forehead was the gunshot wound that ended his life. “It meant a lot to be able to see him,” Heslin said in an interview. “When he was born, I was the first to see him, and I was the last one to hold him.”

Alex Jones, an online conspiracy theorist whose Infowars website is viewed by millions, seized on this agonizing recollection to repeat the bizarre falsehood that the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six adults at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun-grabbers.”

On his radio show, Jones said Heslin needed to clarify “because the coroner said no, the parents weren’t allowed to have touched the kids or have seen the kids.” He played a video in which Infowars “reporter” Owen Shroyer says of Heslin, “He’s claiming that he held his son and saw the bullet hole in his head ... That is not possible.”

More than five years after one of the most horrific mass shootings in modern history, the families of Sandy Hook victims are still enduring daily threats and online abuse from people who believe bogus theories spread by Jones, whom President Donald Trump has praised for his “amazing” reputation.

Now, for the first time, the families are confronting Jones in court.

“When anybody’s behind a machine, whether it’s a gun or a computer or a car, a dehumanization takes place that makes it easier to commit an act of violence,” Veronique De La Rosa, the mother of Noah Pozner, another victim, said in an interview. She is suing Jones, she said, because she wants to force him to admit to his devotees that “he peddled a falsehood, that Sandy Hook is real, and that Noah real,